Observer; Than a Barrel Of People

By RUSSELL BAKER

Published: June 21, 1994

Last weekend's fun was more intense than usual. First there was Sam Donaldson interviewing Paula Jones. Then the networks convicted O. J. Simpson of murder. Afterward we went to the movies and saw Jack Nicholson turn into a werewolf.

Fun of this quality simply did not exist until now. It makes you realize how lucky we are, funwise, to be living in this day and age. Let me cannibalize my own family for material and tell you what my grandmother did for fun:

Had one of her sons at the end of the day drive her out to Spring's store in Lovettsville where she had an ice-cream cone.

Was this, or was this not, the Dark Ages of fun? On summer evenings she would sit in a rocker on the front porch talking to neighbors and relatives and watching it get dark. If you want to know how lucky we are today, imagine living in a world where fun was watching it get dark. And talking.

Whenever I think of my poor old grandmother having to talk to relatives and neighbors, I thank my lucky stars for all the machines now available for taking the drudgery out of talking and putting the fun back in.

For instance, we don't have to do any talking at all with Sam Donaldson and Paula Jones. All we have to do is listen while they talk at us.

And what fun talk it is. Miss Jones is the first woman ever to sue a President on grounds he once made her an indecent proposal. With fun talk like that coming at you, you really wouldn't want to have to talk back, would you?

You just sit there and wallow in the fun. It's a pity Grandmother couldn't have lived to wallow in it with us. When the talking had to be done by her and her relatives and neighbors, there simply wasn't anybody on that porch who had ever even sued a President for betraying his campaign promises, much less for making an indecent proposal.

The talking machines provided even more fun than usual last weekend. As usual professional weekend talkers were on hand to fill the ears with fun abuse of President Clinton and his wife, but last weekend they also had former President Carter to abuse for our entertainment.

For really special, out-of-the-ordinary fun talk, however, it will be many a day before the machines tickle our ears and eyes with entertainment to match the conviction of O. J. Simpson. Having watched and been talked at by the machines I could tell by cocktail time Friday that they were bound to convict Simpson of murder.

You can always tell. The tip-off is that invisible wink the TV people give you when they talk about "the presumption of innocence," after laying out the homicide division's dossier of incriminating evidence.

Assuming that neither the networks nor newspapers would sentence Simpson until Saturday, I decided to seek livelier fun at the movies. If fun is your dish -- and if it's not, what kind of person are you, some out-of-date old grandmother, or something? -- if fun is where your mind, such as it is, is at, you are as powerless as I am to resist Jack Nicholson.

Jack, as we "Entertainment Tonight" fun lovers call him, can overdo the ham now and then, but when the flick is titled "Wolf" fun ham is obviously what the chef meant to cook. Jack turns it into one of the outstanding fun experiences of the week, a parable about the werewolf-eat-werewolf nature of the book-publishing world since its takeover by fun-selling international conglomerates.

The ending, admittedly, was bothersome. Was it supposed to mean that book publishing's only hope for survival as a decent profession depends on werewolves? Was it trying to spoil our fun by making us think?

Fortunately I got back into the house and turned on the TV before any wretched thinking could get a toehold in my head, and sank into the great chase scene of the O. J. Simpson story. Live from coast to coast, scenes from a news helicopter in faraway La La Land were being fed into a zillion tubes.

It was the real-life fulfillment of a futuristic horror depicted in Ray Bradbury's 1950-ish sci-fi novel "Fahrenheit 451," in which civilization entertains itself by watching live TV scenes of police pursuing and destroying lawbreakers.